Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (37 page)

My point of departure for the study of converso identities
4
is the work of a student of Spanish literature, an American scholar named Stephen Gilman. Some years before Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as the site of dialogic het- eroglossia became familiar to Western literary scholars, Gilman advanced his own, not unrelated, view. Influenced by his teacher Americo Castro, who had relied upon Dilthey for his interpretive approach to Hispanic literature,
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and basing himself on a detailed study of a lengthy Spanish drama written a cen- tury before
Don Quixote,
called
La Celestina,
by the converso Fernando de Rojas, Stephen Gilman claimed in
The Art of La Celestina
that the novel has its origin in the dialogic style initiated by Rojas. Rojas, he wrote,

insists that each speech be adequately directed to the second person, that it exists in function of speaker and listener and not merely for the in- struction or entertainment of the reader. These inserted signs of direction, in effect, bring out the inner intentionality of language in
La Celestina
. It is a spoken language (although not always popular) in the sense that it is written as if emerging from one life towards another. Each word, as we shall see, is supported by and gives access to both a
yo
and a
tú
. Dialogue is for Rojas the language which results from the meeting of two lives.

(1956:19)

Corresponding to the dialogic nature of the language, there is in
La Celestina
an absence of fixed characterizations. Speaking of one of the major characters, Gilman writes that “there is no determinable ‘she,’ no third-person Melibea known as such to author and reader, and it would distort the artistry of Rojas to try to discover one” (p. 56). Dialogic openness suggested for Gilman the vulnerability of the self to the power of the other, and not just or even pri- marily the human other. Gilman argues that in the drama time and space themselves are represented as “alien” and conditioning life “as a
tú
—a victim helplessly bound to earth and to the moment. Consciousness in the second person,” Gilman continues, “is necessarily receptive, in the position of being set upon by others, appealed to, persuaded, convinced, bracketed in one cat- egory or another” (p. 148). In Gilman’s reading of the drama, the physical and

social universe is a battleground within which a beleaguered consciousness fights against what Gilman calls its “conditioning,” what we might call its in- escapable inhabitation by otherness. Rojas offers no “high ground” from which to survey this battle; no assurances of a transcendent meaning are ever offered. All commonplaces are ironized, and irony itself is brought within the ambit of what Gilman calls this “literary nightmare.”

When Gilman published his analysis of
La Celestina
in 1956, he was de- rided by many critics for having breathed in too much of what was then in the air, namely, existentialist despair.
6
Gilman, they said, had no historical sense; he was projecting a modern consciousness onto the early sixteenth cen- tury. In response, Gilman wrote another book in which he set out to answer the charge that he had travestied history. Doing extensive archival research in Spain, Gilman produced an account of the cultural milieu from which
La Ce- lestina
as he understood it could plausibly have emerged. The milieu was that of the converso. The book Stephen Gilman produced was
The Spain of Fer- nando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of La Celestina
(1972). As if to drive home the relevance of existentialism for the study of Rojas, Gilman made extensive use of Sartre’s controversial study
Anti-Semite and Jew.
In
The Spain of Fernando de Rojas
Gilman emphasizes the extraordinary variety of converso survival strategies. The society in which the conversos lived had nearly gone mad with suspicion about infiltrating crypto-Jews whose ability to pass as true Christians is so well-honed that the very absence of suspicion about a person is taken as a cause for suspicion. At the heart of Gilman’s analysis of both converso life and the inquisitorial terror that infused every aspect of Iberian culture in the early modern period is what he calls the

“converso paradox.”

Gilman stresses that, unlike their Jewish forbears who may have risen to positions of influence but could never join the ranks of those who held the highest political and ecclesiastical offices, the conversos occupied central po- sitions of authority. However, and herein lies the paradox, the conversos were socially marginalized because they were identified as having “impure” blood through which they inherited a racial taint. According to the racialist theories of the anticonversos, not even the waters of baptism could eradicate the Jew- ish blood taint. For example, Alonso de Espina
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explains that this taint is in fact demonic in origin: as the New Testament itself testifies (John 8:44), Jews are “children of the devil.” It was this taint that led the Jews to the crime of “deicide,” and that might at any time reveal itself again among conversos in a reversion to Judaism and to the Jews’ age-old hatred of Christ and his Church. The “converso paradox” consists in the fact that the conversos are situated both at the center of society, by virtue of the preeminent economic, political,

and ecclesiastical power wielded by many of them, and also at its margins, by virtue of the phobic loathing with which conversos were treated. Stephen Gilman writes:

It was the sociologically singular situation of this caste to be at once whol- ly inside and wholly outside the society in which it lived, at once em- powered to make the most crucial and delicate decisions and yet subject to the arbitrary power of the Inquisitors.
(p. 137)

In reflecting on what Gilman calls the central paradox of the converso caste, its positioning both “wholly inside and wholly outside the society in which it lived,” we may be helped by the analysis of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick de- scribes as the “terrorism” associated with the “double bind” constituting the social bonds among males in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European so- ciety.
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Sedgwick (1990:184) argues that the category of “the homosexual” as it is deployed at this historical juncture is part of an overarching system for “the regulation of the male homosocial bonds that structure
all
culture—at any rate, all public or heterosexual culture.” This regulation derives its force from the fact that male social bonds—Sedgwick mentions “male friendship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and hetero- sexual rivalry” (p. 186) among them—are constituted by the same kind of li- bidinal investment that is also powerfully anathematized as “homosexuality.” What is thereby created is a double bind that demands constant self-vigilance and creates a general paranoia about homosexuals at every level of society passing as straight. One of Sedgwick’s aims is to reveal within the culture con- stituted by the homosexual-heterosexual binarism, “the instability of the bi- narism itself, usually couched as
the simultaneous interiority and exteriority of a marginalized to a normative term
” (p. 92; my emphasis).

When we look at the case of the converso within Spanish society, we find that there is a similar instability in the Old Christian/New Christian binarism, and that extraordinary efforts were taken to provide some incontrovertible cri- terion whereby the difference could be definitionally secured. The criterion chosen was the “purity of the blood,”
limpieza de sangre
. Since intermarriage among New Christian and Old Christian families had been extremely com- mon throughout the fifteenth century, however, the “purity” of one’s blood could always be called into question. Just as the libidinal ties among men that, according to Sedgwick, underlie modern bourgeois society are inextricably

“mixed” with anathematized homoeroticism, so too the blood that allegedly forged a common bond among “true” Spaniards was “mixed,” without any hope of a definitive cleansing, with the “alien” blood of the Jew. The mixture of “good” and “bad” libidinal ties, or “good” and “bad” blood, leads in each case to a similar result, namely, the effort to project a social self “beyond sus- picion.” In the Iberian context purity of blood was thought to be associated with certain external signs, such as dress and gesture. The very thing that was supposed to supply the inviolable core of the Old Christian’s identity, his blood, was thus linked to his social performance, and, as we know, every per- formance is always already imitable. “Is this how an authentic Old Christian behaves, or is this the behavior of a ‘passing’ converso?” was a question that was not only asked about others but was also addressed to oneself.
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The consequence of this intense self-scrutiny, and we may concentrate on the converso class for the moment, was in some cases an excessive rigidifica- tion of the social persona in an effort to fix an otherwise terrifying instability of identity. In other cases the result was an ironic disdain for any social per- sona as mere performance. Sometimes rigidity of persona and ironization of persona alternated in the same individual. Gilman summarizes the lived ex- perience of the converso this way:

Suspicious of each other, suspected by everybody else, the
conversos
lived in a world in which no human relationship could be counted on, in which a single unpremeditated sentence could bring unutterable humil- iation and unbearable torture. It was a world in which one had con- stantly to observe oneself from an alien point of view, that of the watch- ers from without. It was a world of simulation and camouflage.

(1972:147)

This for Gilman is the world from which
La Celestina
emerged, a work characterized above all else by an astonishing lack of transcendance, the epis- temological if not ontological absence of the divine. To use Gilman’s striking formulation, the world of
La Celestina
is the world “of an axiological orphan, cast out by God and History” (p. 203). I believe it would not be incorrect to see in this radical desacralization of existence something that resonates close- ly with “modernity” (or even “postmodernity”).
10

One danger, however, that needs to be guarded against as we reflect on converso existence in relation to the modern and postmodern experience is the romanticization of the converso as a metaphor for a performative and “hy- brid” selfhood that disrupts the seemingly stable binarisms through which our culture is constituted.
11
Such a romanticization is blind to the evidence of just

what the lived experience of an “insider-outsider” can be like. It also ignores the transformations the converso can undergo once he finds himself free from the need to engage in simulation and camouflage. Gilman offers some exam- ples of converso authors who adopted what might be called a “ludic” attitude toward themselves and society, investing both their social and textual personas with a certain transgressive irony.
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However, such play with “marrano” self- hood is exceptional. When offered an opportunity to escape from the self- diremption of converso existence, most conversos chose what they saw to be a more stable form of identity. Some sought to pass as Old Christians through carefully reconstructing the story of their lineage, often with forged docu- ments; some chose to be “Jews” in the secrecy of their homes, forging links through marriage with other such “Jews” and thereby reconstructing an alter- native “subculture” where their masks could be cast off; some left the Iberian peninsula and either joined or created normatively Jewish communities, al- though they often challenged the previous notions of normativity in the process.
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In the previous section I suggested that there was a
structural
similarity be- tween what Sedgwick calls “heterosexual terror” and the double bind de- scribed by Stephen Gilman in his analysis of the converso under the terror of the Inquisition. In both cases a certain kind of person—the homosexual, the Jew—is anathematized and powerful social forces are mobilized to uproot and expel that person from the body of the society. At the same time, the entire society, especially its centers of power, is given its driving force by its appro- priation and incorporation of the anathematized object under a different guise. Although Jews had been expelled from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, Jewish blood continued to be “mixed” throughout society, and especially within its highest strata, and the fear of being suspected of covert Judaizing kept nearly everyone in a state of terror. That which ought to have been ex- pelled—homosexuality in one instance, or Judaism in the other—has in fact been drawn inward into the very core of the social body, with the consequence that new apparatuses of self-regulation and social control are constructed and invested with extraordinary powers.

But the parallel between Sedgwick’s “heterosexual terror” and the terror of the Inquisition is not only structural. The Jew’s blood was imagined to carry not only the ineradicable and demonic propensity toward the hatred of Christ

and his Church but also a tendency toward effeminacy (understood especial- ly as lack of martial prowess) and sodomy. Jewish blood by its nature violat- ed the divine order (carrying a demonic hatred of Christ) and the social order (contaminating the purity of Spanish family lineages) as well as the sexual order. One of the accusations brought against Jews in explanation of their need for Christian blood (leading to ritual murder) was that Jewish males menstruate. (See Mirrer 1996:73; Yerushalmi 1971:128). The “unnatural” flow of blood was not only something the Jew suffered, he was also believed to ritually enact it in the annual killing of a Christian whose “orderly” blood was thought to provide a temporary antidote to the Jew’s hemorrhages. In- deed, the unnatural flow of blood was thought to inaugurate Jewish mascu- line identity as perversion: one thirteenth-century Spanish text (“Debate be- tween a Christian and Jew”) identifies the blood shed during circumcision, staunched by the mohel’s sucking the wound with his mouth (
metsitsah
) (see Hoffman 1996:91–92), as an ingredient in a veiled homosexual ritual:

Whereas when you think well upon it (you will see that) you commit an outrageous act that lies herein; that the mouth of your rabbi who begins your prayers, you make into a woman’s cunt; and even more you know that the chin and the nose don’t belong there. And even more you see what an outrage it is to suck blood from such a place.
14

In Castilian culture of the late middle ages, the Jewish male was figured as the feminized antitype of virile Christian masculinity. The Jew was the orig- inal source of sodomy: “Sodomy came from the Jews. . . . From the Jews it went to the Muslims, to bad Christians” declares the
Libro llamado alborayque
of 1488 (quoted in Mirrer 1996:73).
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In general the negative images of the Jewish male were “feminizing” ones. The Jew was proverbially a coward (there was a saying, “Muy cobardes, más que judíos,” “Very cowardly, more than Jews”)
16
and a “cornudo” (cuckold) was a feminizing characterization of the male, according to Brandes (1980:90–91).
17

As long as the Jew was a visible presence in Iberian Christian society, it was possible literally to cordon off the threat of Jewish “contamination” through spacial and social segregation. However, the presence of large num- bers of conversos in Spain from the fifteenth century onward meant that the clear identification of the despised and demonized Other, the Jewish male, was no longer possible. And after 1492 the Jewish male as such disappeared from the scene, but Jewish blood circulated dangerously and covertly throughout the corporate Spanish body. The construction of a “pure” Span- ish masculinity required constant self-vigilance in order to demonstrate both

to the world and to oneself that one had not been tainted by any admixture of Jewish blood in one’s lineage. Those who believed themselves to be “pure” of blood not only adhered to a rigid “machismo” code of behavior that placed a premium on military prowess and aggressive virility, but they also attempt- ed to project their dread of internal contamination outward onto those who were believed to be conversos. The text I quoted above,
Libro llamado albo- rayque
, in which Jews are identified as the source of sodomy, is written with the aim of “outing” the conversos as “false” Christians and “secret” Jews. I would not deny that nonconversos suspected of engaging in homosexual acts were also objects of phobic disgust and frequently put to death in Iberian machismo culture,
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but the obsession with blood purity suggests that the image of the effeminate, secretly circumcised converso male provided the focus for most of the homophobic projections of the machismo male.

The converso was therefore an overdetermined bearer of all the transgres- sive connotations of Jewish blood. Demonic in origin, cursed, and inimical to the divinely created order itself, Jewish blood polluted the converso from within, no matter what his outer “mask” might suggest. In the previous sec- tion we saw how the lived experience of the converso led some, the “axiolog- ical orphans” in Stephen Gilman’s phrase, to a rejection of the reality of order within creation as vouchsafed by a transcendent source of meaning. Others, some of them crypto-Jews and some fervently Christian, sought solace in a messianic expectation of the end of this false order and the dawning of a new utopian order in which the present values would be reversed. We may call these axiological dreamers. The orphans and the dreamers define the an- tipodes of converso responses to the unbearable pressure placed on them from within (by the internalization of the negative connotations associated with their blood) and from without (by the need to project social personae beyond suspicion). Between these two poles conversos found many different ways to escape, if only intermittently, their predicament.

As we seek to understand the psychodynamics of converso existence, we may be assisted by the insights of Frantz Fanon. Fanon was, like Stephen Gilman, influenced by Sartre’s
Anti-Semite and Jew
, and he arrived at some strikingly similar formulations in his
Black Skin, White Masks
(1967) to those of Gilman.
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Fanon attempted to analyze the psychic disintegration of the black colonized subject under the pressure of what he called the “racial epi- dermal schema” of the white colonizer (p. 112). This racial epidermal schema is the overdetermined image of everything held to be ugly, shameful, and dan- gerous in the fantasy of the colonizer. Projected outward in “manichean delir- ium” (p. 183) by the colonizer upon the black colonized subject who has in-

ternalized the same Manichaean delirium through his training in white-run schools and his exposure to white-authored texts, this wholly negative epider- mal schema stands in direct conflict with the the black individual’s sense of uncorrupted and positively valued selfhood associated with the “corporeal schema” developed during early childhood prior to contact with the Manichaean delirium of colonial culture. Eventually, the integrity of the cor- poreal schema is ruptured.

The converso, I would suggest, is subject to much the same corporeal self- alienation under the pressure of Iberian culture’s “manichean delirium” as is the black colonized subject in Fanon’s analysis. However, in the case of con- verso, the racial schema is not epidermal but
flowing in his veins.
It may be easier for the converso to “pass” under cover of a mask of Christian purity, but the psychic disruption is just as real. What we are talking about, in both the case of the converso and the black colonial subject, is an assault upon the ego’s libidinal investment in its own integral bodily image by an alien racial schema, whether epidermal or “in the blood,” that is the bearer of all the neg- ative images of the hegemonic culture. The response to this assault is, in some cases, a narcissistic identification with an imaginary self that is inviolable and pure. In other words, a narcissistic counterformation is sometimes generated in response to what is in actuality the assault by an opposing narcissism, since the Manichaean splitting of “good” and “bad” and the appropriation of the “good” by one group and the projection of the “bad” onto another is itself a symptom of narcissism.

Taking his lead from Fanon, Homi Bhabha has analyzed in some detail the dialectical tensions of the narcissistic “face-off ” in cultures riven by Manichaean delerium.
20
Bhabha’s analysis attempts to complicate Fanon’s stark portrait of the psychic disintegration of the colonial subject, offering a contestatory reading of the play of images that proliferate as the narcissistic face-off escalates and, turning upon itself, disrupts all claims to a stable, invi- olate identity. As I have mentioned above, there was little room for ludic hy- bridity in inquisitorial Spain, although Stephen Gilman has pointed to cer- tain forms of converso self-presentation in early modern Spain that may fit Bhabha’s description of “hybridity.” In the case of Abraham Cardoso, on the other hand, I think we are in the territory of narcissism, and I will shortly de- tail this claim by examining his own claim to messianic status. In the context of the machismo images of Jewish blood as the demonic carrier of effemina- cy, it should not surprise us that in the case of Abraham Cardoso we find a “supermasculine” ideal self-image projected as the fulfillment of Israel’s mes- sianic hopes.